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01 February, 2008

Joomla and JoomlaWorks Drive Me to Cleaning the Pool

This week I've been playing around with Joomla, the open source content management system. This package runs on a variety of platforms and allows for a very dynamic and granular control of the content of your website. I've got it running on my laptop under OS X and then again on this Mac under a VMWare Debian build.

I am trying to learn Joomla configuration and set up. My eventual plan is to get KarobStudios.com up an running for my friends. Eventually, I'll move their web site to Joomla. Right now it was created with an older version of iWeb which works fine.

There are 2 versions of Joomla out there. Joomla 1.0 which has been around for quite a while, is stable and in wide use. Then there is Joomla 1.5 which just went into production this month. Both work in a similar fashion. Both are expandable through extensions. Some extensions run fine on both versions without any fuss. But there are some extensions that don't quite seem to work in 1.5 though they do in 1.0.

I spent all morning trying to get JoomlaWorks free "Simple Image Gallery" (SIG). SIG is a popular extension that allows one to add images and slide shows to their web site by simply typing "{gallery}picfolder{/gallery}.

Pretty easy, don't you think? The problem I had was I was trying this out on Joomla 1.5 and all I got on my page was the name of my picture folder (picfolder in the example above). Drag. Then I saw that JoomlaWorks is planning on coming out with Joomla 1.5 compatible extensions starting in February.

Once I realized that I was chasing a duck that didn't exist, I went outside for some sun and to finally clean the pool. That was relaxing. I recommend cleaning a pool whenever you get stuck with a computer problem. It really does help. Check out Joomla if you have a web site. You just might like it.